Many mobile and desktop computer software applications provide auto-complete mechanisms which suggest entities from a list as a user types, character-by-character. For example, many social networking applications utilize auto-complete mechanisms to facilitate the posting of messages to other users. In particular, each entity (i.e., a name) in a list of suggested entities has a special programmatic meaning such that when a selected entity (e.g., “John Smith”) is posted, the social networking application will send a message directly to that user. The above-described auto-complete mechanisms however, suffer from a number of drawbacks. For example, because each entity suggested by an auto-complete mechanism is atomic (i.e., if the text of the entity is split up or modified in any way it would no longer have a valid meaning), any edits, such as the deletion of one or more characters, to an entity will result in the special programmatic meaning being broken and thus, nothing will happen when posting a message to the entity. Previous solutions to this problem include providing a visual indication that the entity is “special” (e.g., surrounding the entity in brackets, using background shading, displaying the entity in a different color, etc.) and then hoping the user will not make any changes or modifications which might break the special programmatic meaning. However, the aforementioned solution is aesthetic only and does not actually prevent a user from modifying the entity. Other solutions include disallowing a user from making any changes to the text of a message after starting to type or inserting the entity. However, the aforementioned solution also has the undesirable result of forcing the user to erase the entire message and start over from scratch when it becomes necessary to modify any text (including text not associated with the entity) in the message, thereby stripping the user of the ability to edit their message while typing. It is with respect to these considerations and others that the various embodiments of the present invention have been made.